Summer of '67: The Week That Changed Newark

The summer of 1967 was one that defined the city of Newark: From the time the rebellion began on Wednesday, July 12, to the conclusion on Monday, July 17, 26 people died and 750 people were injured. The events that took place throughout Mid-July that year changed the history of Newark forever.

This timeline depicts the events of what occurred throughout the six days of unrest throughout the City of Newark in the Summer of 1967. Please click on the interactive timeline below to learn more on what happened.

Information for this timeline was provided by author and historian Junius Williams, and his website riseupnorth.com

And please watch this page for new features and a special live broadcast of Newark Today, 8pm on Thursday, July 13th.

Media coverage of the 1967 Newark Rebellion depicted chaos in New Jersey’s largest city, but many people who were there say some major inaccuracies were reported as fact.

“Sniper Fire from open windows kills two policemen a fire captain shot in the back while answering a false alarm and several bystanders. Officials say the snipers, some not believed to be Newark residents use guns stolen from a local rifle factory. Even machine guns were used,” said one movie house newsreel following the Newark riots.

Kenneth Gibson was elected the first African-American Mayor of the city of Newark in 1970, just 3 years after the Newark Rebellion, inheriting a city that was still recovering from the events of the summer of 1967, a job most politicians may have shied away from but for Gibson the timing was just right. Hear his story in his own words.

As we mark the 50th anniversary of the Newark Rebellion we take a look back at what led up to the incident that would become a defining moment for the city and what has changed since those hot summer days in July of 1967.

The Newark Rebellion monument is blocks away from the old 4th precinct, where the riots and protest began. Over one-hundred people gathered to pay their respects to the 26 lives lost during the uprising.

Through the 50 years since the Newark Rebellion in 1967, the police version of the story has seldom been told. In 2007, historian and author Adele Oltman filed this in-depth report for the WBGO Journal.

Oltman spoke to several officers who were there at the time of the unrest broke out, including John DeSimone, who was one of the arresting officers of taxi cab driver John Smith.

The Abyssnian Baptist Church hosted a commemoration of the 1967 Newark Rebellion on Tuesday night. The prayer service offered interfaith clergy the opportunity to come together.

The event featured Junius Williams, director of the Abbott Leadership Institute, and Mayor of Newark Ras J. Baraka. Both Williams and Baraka spoke about the need for an accurate depiction of Newark prior to and during 1967. To Baraka, Newark would not be the city it is today without the unrest 50 years ago.

The fight over the city of Newark’s secretary to the Board of Education appointee in 1967, stemmed from the Mayor promising somebody the job, while the majority African American community called for somebody else. Don Melafronte was Mayor Hugh Addonizio’s chief of staff.

“The job at the board of ed, the secretary to the board of education was essentially a political job. He was essentially the administrator of the budget and some other stuff at the board of ed. It had zero to do with curriculum.”

Before the 1967 Newark Rebellion, Mayor Hugh Addonizio was getting ready to sign off on a project that would have used one-hundred-and-fifty acres of the city's central ward to erect a state of the art medical school. WBGO's Ang Santos took a stroll with Junius Williams, the director of the Abbot Leadership Institute at Rutgers-Newark, who says that plan would have destroyed the heart of the Newark community.

The population of Newark, and the Jewish Community in particular, dwindled drastically after the 1967 Newark Rebellion. While some call it “white flight,” others say the national push towards suburbanization pulled them away.

Over 65,000 people once made up Newark’s Jewish community. William Helmreich, author and educator, says an undue amount of blame is placed on the 1967 Newark Rebellion for pushing them out.

To start off, the title of the course was titled “Global Citizenship in a Global World”. Entering the course, I believed that we will be discussing different figurative role models in history, that has made significant change in the world. I was wrong, to a certain degree.

I was blown away by the history that was embedded in the city of Newark. Professor Junius Williams, who was a major activists during the Newark Riots, spearheaded the class, with his fabulous stories of his experiences not only here in Newark, but also in Montgomery, Alabama during the Jim Crow Era.

Life-long Newark resident Richard Cammarieri was a teenager in the city's central ward in 1967.

"There was a sense that things were quite inferment throughout the 60's if you were paying any attention at all," Cammarieri said. "My father worked in a town not too far from Newark. I recall drving with him one day to work. It was probably the second day. Because we were white, we were able to pass through the road blocks and cross checks without any problem. Other cars being stopped had black drivers. Both men and women, old and young, it didn't seem to matter."

There were 163 reported protests, riots, rebellions, and uprisings across the United States in the summer of '67. No communities more impacted than Detroit and Newark. Max Herman is the author of ‘Summer of Rage: An Oral History of the 1967 Newark and Detroit Riots’. He says that year is difficult for many residents of both cities to revisit.

“In Newark it has been commemorated but in Detroit, I think for the first time they’re having a program this summer,” Herman said.